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Pleased to Be Here

Run down to the bar and rouse the culture editor: the impossible has happened. In the dispiriting age of Bush and Britney, with our military still bogged down in Baghdad and our media still bewitched by Beverly Hills, an accomplished, respected American writer (a recent National Book Award Winner, in fact) has published a serious patriotic novel. Its title, “A Free Life,” is not altogether ironic. Its subject, everyday bravery and nobility in a system built on risk and too often based on mutual exploitation, is delivered straight. Finally, its Chinese-born author, Ha Jin (whose seven previous works of fiction have all been set abroad), seems positively pleased and proud to be here.

Or at least his characters do. Nan and Pingping Wu, a husband and wife, are the sort of persevering newcomers, firmly set on a legal path to citizenship by way of unremitting thrift and toil, whom presidents like to point to from the podium during major addresses on the economy. Much as Jin himself did, the Wus came from China to study, not to stay, but they realized after the Tiananmen Square massacre (as Jin did too, he’s said in interviews) that they couldn’t go home again and be themselves, since both their selves and their native land had changed. “A Free Life” is the story of their family’s naturalization — bank deposit by bank deposit, dental appointment by dental appointment, appliance purchase by appliance purchase — and like most novels of what professors call “The American Immigrant Experience,” it’s chiefly a tale of trial and error. The trials provide the drama, the errors the comedy, and their overlap the pathos. It’s an orthodox format, hard to reinvent, mostly because reinvention is its theme.

For Nan, who’s at graduate school in Boston when the tank turrets swivel in downtown Beijing, the first trick is to switch from brains to brawn. To support the good wife whom he doesn’t truly love and the young son, Taotao, whom he doesn’t quite understand, he gives up the life of the mind, which suits his temperament, for the lot of the laborer, which doesn’t. On one of his early jobs as a security guard, he runs out to a market for a snack and finds himself waylaid on his return trip by a boozy, aggressive man and woman who badger him to come with them to a party packed with “purty girls.” Nan’s confusion about their motives panics him. Once he’s back at his post with the trusty pocket dictionary he’s using to improve his English and the tattered literary classics that speak to his stifled dream of writing poetry, he concludes that he’s barely avoided being forced to join in an orgy or a smut film. Had he weakened, it might be all over for him now. His aspirations are thoroughly middle-class — a decent house, a healthy bank account and maybe, someday, time for thought and art — and while he knows he’s starting from the bottom, he also knows that, in America, there’s nothing under the bottom but more bottom.

As Jin puts the Wus through their paces as up-and-comers who might become down-and-outers at any moment (or so their exaggerated sense of caution causes them to fear), the story develops the cycling, skipping rhythm of a dirty compact disc. Each step up for the Wus — from renter to owner, employee to employer, bricked-in city dweller to waterfront suburbanite — stirs a vivid burst of hope followed by a fresh new stretch of static, as when the Wus grow mistrustful of the lawyer who uses a legal tactic called a “straw” to secure their joint title to a small restaurant they’ve bought in Atlanta’s all-beige strip mall outskirts.

Photo

Ha JinCredit
Jerry Bauer

“Stupefied, Nan couldn’t help but imagine that they’d sold their business for only one dollar. At the same time, he kept reminding himself that he shouldn’t be too paranoid or think ill of Mr. Shang. ... According to the attorney, they’d receive a notice about the registration from the deeds office within two months. What could the Wus do in the meantime? It looked like they could do nothing but wait anxiously.”

The nervousness of the Wus is not infectious but sympathy-inducing, like watching a bright child learn to spell. You know she will; you just wish that she knew, too. Given the novel’s 600-page-plus length, the Wus’ regular lapses into bafflement breed no suspense about their ultimate destinies. As they blunder along through the hazards and the hassles of ascending sandy Mount Capitalism, from confronting bouts of sickness without sufficient insurance to losing, in stages, their only child’s attention to the nonstop come-hithers of the Internet, the sheer volume of unread print and untouched paper signals us that their climb will go ahead, with lots of skids and slip-ups, naturally, but no headlong plunges, even at the end. Volatility, after all, is a measure of health in a free market, and the elementary algebra of Jin’s narrative pace — as slow, implacable and steady as interest accumulating in a savings account — implicitly promises that his dimes and quarters of mundane description and petty conflict will result in a full piggy bank for all. Neither does Jin give his people flaws or problems grave enough to threaten their well-being. Pingping’s chronic fretting is not disabling, and Nan’s nascent ambitions as a poet aren’t the kind that lead to leaps off bridges if they go unattained.

The Wus’ credentials as model neo-puritans — their humility, self-sacrifice, efficiency and unremitting skepticism about easy credit in all its forms, including the loans to the erotic self afforded by commercial sex and porn, which Nan feels calling to him on occasion — are so unassailable that if they failed, the book would wind up as an Upton Sinclair-ish protest novel; a case study in humanity’s futile puniness against the Great Machine. The Wus are the only ones who can’t see that they’re moving up, which feels almost jokelike because the novel’s timeline — from the late ’80s to the late ’90s — was, we know now, an era of mass bounty. The novel’s sole mystery is how satisfied the Wus will feel when they pull up the rope ladder behind them and kick back in their little piece of heaven. The range of possibilities is narrow. They won’t be euphoric — it’s not their way — but they won’t be radically disappointed, either. A headspinning windfall might unhinge them, yes, but what seems most likely, and what we watch occur, is their introduction to the faint melancholy of “Is this all there is?” American comfort, followed by Nan’s resolution to aim higher on the spiritual and mental plane the instant his mortgage is paid off.

Impeccable kitchen-sink realism? Not really. The two steps forward, one step back progression of the Wu’s acculturation may be true to the actual experiences of countless naïve, non-native English speakers, but it feels here more like a monastic meditation or a ritual breathing exercise than a fictional documentary. Jin’s simple sentences, familiar sentiments, and uneventful three- to five-page chapters that typically end with such pulse-suppressing non-cliffhangers as “the day before the Wangs returned, the Wus moved out of the bungalow and set up their residence at 568 March Drive,” appear to derive from a highly refined aesthetic of anti-excitability.

Life, from day to day, seems hardly to alter, yet it shifts beyond recognition over the years — this is what fascinates Jin, apparently, and it’s what the Zen-like composure of his prose and his conveyor-belt time-sense seek to demonstrate. This proved, the experimental apparatus keeps on operating, though, repeating the same results with dwindling verve and testing the inner Buddhist in Jin’s audience in ways that some may find calming and others sedating. Aside from a bruising medical episode concerning the abortion of a dead fetus, the novel’s fiercest interludes are rhetorical, as the Pledge of Allegiance-minded Nan debates the China-first set at various gatherings. Eventually, thanks to a winning raffle ticket, he gets to see firsthand the country he left, which has been transformed during his absence into a carnival caricature of the nation he left it for. That Nan finds China’s rapaciousness familiar from what its blackest propagandists have alleged about America is the novel’s only excursion into cynicism. Nan has seen the future, and it ain’t us. His retreat to Atlanta and a menial job that will at last allow him to write poetry feels oddly elegiac — a great leap backward into a New World that he was too busy growing into, and growing fond of, to notice becoming ancient.

A FREE LIFE

By Ha Jin.

660 pp. Pantheon Books. $26.

Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His latest novel is “The Unbinding.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page 614 of the New York edition with the headline: Pleased to Be Here. Today's Paper|Subscribe